SACRAMENTO / No clemency hearing for inmate, 75 / Governor to review written arguments for and against it

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, January 5, 2006

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ALLEN

ALLEN

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SACRAMENTO / No clemency hearing for inmate, 75 / Governor to review written arguments for and against it

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will not hold a clemency hearing for Clarence Ray Allen, the 75-year-old Death Row inmate who is scheduled to be executed Jan. 17 for ordering three murders from his prison cell in 1980, the governor's office said Wednesday.

Schwarzenegger will review written arguments for and against clemency before deciding whether to spare Allen's life, spokeswoman Julie Soderlund said. Allen's lawyer had hoped to speak to the governor about why the state should not kill a seriously ill, blind prisoner who uses a wheelchair.

"Not to be personally heard adds to our concern about the fairness of the whole process," said the attorney, Michael Satris. "Where a person's life is at stake, there ought to be some minimum elements of due process."

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Schwarzenegger has denied clemency for three other condemned prisoners. He held no hearing before approving the execution of Kevin Cooper, who later won a reprieve from a federal appeals court and is now appealing a new court order upholding his death sentence. The governor ordered a public hearing before the state parole board for Donald Beardslee, who was executed last January, and met privately with opposing lawyers in the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, who was put to death Dec. 13.

The governor's office did not explain his decision to forgo a hearing on Allen.

Allen, who will turn 76 the day before his scheduled execution at San Quentin State Prison, was a businessman who became the leader of a theft ring in the San Joaquin Valley and was convicted of ordering the 1974 murder of his son's girlfriend.

While serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison, he was convicted of ordering three more murders at a Fresno supermarket in 1980, including the killing of a witness from his earlier trial. The gunman, Billy Ray Hamilton, is also on Death Row.

In seeking clemency, and in a separate filing for a stay of execution pending before the state Supreme Court, Allen's lawyers have argued that killing him would be cruel and unnecessary.

They said he would be the oldest and sickest man California has ever executed. Allen is legally blind, feeble and unable to walk, and suffered a heart attack in September. Allen poses no risk of harm to anyone if allowed to live out his life in prison, his lawyers said.

The state attorney general's office has argued that Allen's crimes showed he was a menace even in prison, and that his long stay on Death Row was largely due to extensive court appeals.

"The fact that Allen has been able to live his life after depriving so many innocent people of theirs is no reason to show him mercy now," Deputy Attorney General Ward Campbell said in a letter to Schwarzenegger.

The written materials Schwarzenegger will review include statements supporting clemency by Joseph Grodin, the former state Supreme Court justice who wrote the 1986 decision upholding Allen's death sentence, and Daniel Vasquez, the warden at San Quentin from 1983 to 1993.

Vasquez said he saw Allen in prison two weeks ago and described him as "a pathetic sight: aged, downcast, dejected, isolated, oblivious to his surroundings, cuffed to his wheelchair, and utterly defeated."